Guides, Tutorials & Insights
Learn about residential proxies, web scraping, data collection strategies, and industry best practices from the Shifter team.
Do Airlines and Hotels Quote You Differently by Exit Country? We Checked
We loaded Ryanair fares and Booking.com hotel prices from six countries through residential IPs. What changed, what did not and what we could not reach.
Chris Collins · September 24, 2026 Weekday, Weekend, Holiday: How Block Rates Move With the Calendar
Nobody publishes scraper block rates by day of week. What bot, holiday and peak-event data shows about why they move, and how to measure your own calendar.
Matt Brown · September 24, 2026 Subnet Contagion: When One Blocked IP Poisons Its Neighbours
Blocklists and reputation systems often judge an IP by its neighbours. What research shows about range-level blocking, its collateral damage and how to spot it.
James Meadow · September 23, 2026 The Silent Failure Rate: What Share of Successful Requests Return the Wrong Content
An HTTP 200 does not mean you got the page. What research shows about block pages, soft 404s and challenges hiding behind success, and how to measure your own.
Chris Collins · September 23, 2026 Building a Target Health Score: Knowing a Site Is Turning Against You
Sites rarely block a crawler in one step. They challenge, soft-block and slow down first. How to turn those signals into one score per site, and act on it.
Matt Brown · September 22, 2026 Cost-Aware Crawl Scheduling: Spending Your Budget Where It Changes
Most recrawl budget is spent confirming nothing changed. How to schedule by expected value per cost, and why the pages that change fastest are not the best buy.
James Meadow · September 22, 2026 Backpressure and Flow Control in Distributed Crawlers
A crawler is a pipeline, and its fastest stage will flood its slowest. How bounded queues, pull-based work and adaptive per-host limits keep a crawler stable.
Chris Collins · September 22, 2026 Running Scrapers in CI/CD: Proxy Credentials, Secrets and Test Runs
How to run scrapers in CI without leaking proxy credentials or burning bandwidth on every push: secret storage, test tiers, sessions, quota checks and rotation.
Chris Collins · September 21, 2026